 Well, I love to read. I love to read biographies. I find that reading biography sharpens you in so many ways. And I read baseball biographies in the summer. And I read presidents biographies, usually in January and February. And I was reading this biography of Benjamin Franklin, written by Thomas Kidd, called the Religious Life of a Founding Father. And I was intrigued. I was intrigued for many different reasons. Because as a grade schooler in the public school, I can remember when we would have plays about the Founding Fathers. And I remember we had a song about Benjamin Franklin that we had to memorize and sing. I'm not going to sing it for you tonight. But I remember the words, and I remember the tune. It was called Wise Old Benjamin Franklin. And I've often been intrigued by the life of Franklin, because of his place as a Founding Father. The question of his deism and his faith, what was he really? I find it interesting, his own spiritual journey, given the family that he came from, his relationship with evangelist George Whitfield. That's intrigued me greatly over the years. And so I was greatly helped by reading Thomas Kidd's biography. And it's a privilege to have him at Colorado Christian University. This is the second time. First time while I've been here, he is currently the Associate Director of the Institute for Studies of Religion and the James Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. He's written many books. His books include the one on Benjamin Franklin, The American Colonial History, Clashing of Cultures and Faiths by Yale University Press, Baptists in America, A History by Oxford University Press, George Whitfield, America's Spiritual Founding Father by Yale University Press, Patrick Henry, First Among Patriots, God of Liberty, A Religious History of the American Revolution, A Book on the Great Awakening, and many others. He's written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. He blogs at Evangelical History at the Gospel Coalition website. Dr. Kidd received his PhD from University of Notre Dame, where he studied and worked with under the supervision of George Marston. He received his BA and MA from Clemson University. He is from Waco, Texas now, and his wife Ruby, and he have two sons, Jonathan and Joshua. So tonight he's going to speak about the enigma of Ben Franklin's faith. Would you please welcome Dr. Thomas Kidd. Well, thank you, Dr. Sweeting, and thanks to all you for coming out tonight. It is an honor to be here, and I would like to bring you greetings from your sister Christian School, Baylor University. And it's an honor to be here and see some familiar faces that I met last time, and some people that I'm connected with just on Twitter or Facebook, which is the world we live in now, isn't it? At Thomas S. Kidd, for those of you who care about that sort of thing. And again, thank you to President Sweeting and to Jeff Hunt, Centennial Institute, and Cary Blackamp and the rest of the President's Office staff for the invitation setting this up. I love coming here, and I'm delighted to see that you all are flourishing, and students especially don't take that for granted. So Ben Franklin's faith, he is enigmatic. He calls himself a deist in his autobiography, and yet there are things all through his life that would suggest that there's at least more to the story than just being a simple deist. So to explain that, let's start with a story of something that happened at the Constitutional Convention. In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, time dragged, probably know the story, as delegates bickered about representation in Congress. Virginia's James Madison insisted that states with more people should possess more power. And the small states knew that under the Articles of Confederation, America's existing national government, that all states had equal authority, regardless of population. So why should the small states give up that power under a new Constitution? And they bickered and delayed the process of ratification and so forth, and the convention might really have failed at this point. And I don't know what American history would have been like if it had failed, but it really could have failed. And at a minimum, if it had, the country would have continued to struggle under the inefficient, and some said feckless, Articles of Confederation government. Or the new American nation might have simply disintegrated. At this critical moment, the octogenarian Ben Franklin took the floor. And calling for unity, he asked delegates to open their sessions with prayer. As they were, quote, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, he queried, how has it happened that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the father of lights to illuminate our understandings? If they continue to ignore God, quote, our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future ages. This man who called himself a deist now insisted that delegates should ask God for wisdom. And that was strange, because classic deists didn't believe that God intervened in human affairs. Even more strange, he was one of the few delegates who thought that opening sessions with prayer was a good idea. His motion was tabled. I don't know if you know that part of the story, but the motion was tabled for prayer. I'll tell you more about that in a minute, but what kind of deist is this elderly man calling on America's greatest political minds to humble themselves before God? Franklin's work at the Constitutional Convention was the culmination of his spectacular career. He and George Washington, who was 26 years his junior, were not the architects of the Constitution. That role fell to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others, but Franklin and Washington were the two most famous Americans in 1787, and delegates looked on Franklin with respect and awe. There seemed little doubt that Washington, the imposing Virginia General, would become president of the convention. If there was any competitor for chair, though, it was the venerable Franklin. Quote, the very heavens obey him, a dazzled Georgia delegate noted. But Franklin had planned to nominate Washington as chair himself if a storm had not kept him home for the opening day of the meeting in Philadelphia. This son of Boston Puritans had come a long way to get to that Philadelphia meeting hall. In the late spring of 1787, he exchanged letters with his beloved sister, Jane Mecom, who was an evangelical Christian, and the sibling who maintained the longest correspondence with and the deepest influence on Ben Franklin. And they reminisced about their humble beginnings as the children of a Boston candle maker. Mecom had remained a person of very humble means, really poverty, and relative anonymity while her brother's fame skyrocketed. Ben told her that the course of his life struck him, quote, with wonder, and fills me with humble thankfulness to that divine being who has graciously conducted my steps and prospered me in the strange land to a degree I could not rationally have expected and can by no means conceive myself to have merited. I beg the continuance of his favor. Chronic sickness made it difficult for Franklin to stand and speak by 1787, but he did offer occasional comments at the convention, seeking to steer the delegates toward a successful conclusion. But early on, he also made a substantive speech, arguing, get this, arguing against paying a salary to the president or to other members of the executive branch, no salary. He based his argument for this on his dim view of human nature and of politicians' temptations to personal aggrandizement, quote, there are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men, he declared. These are ambition and avarice, the love of power and the love of money, place before the eyes of such men a post of honor that shall at the same time be a place of profit and they will move heaven and earth to obtain it. I will not make any comments on current events at this point and just move on. Where was I? So such corruption, he said, had ruined British politics and he wished to uncouple America's government from the profit motive. Citing Exodus 1821, Franklin reminded delegates that the best rulers were, quote, men hating covetousness. If you turned politics into an avenue for personal gain, only the most, quote, bold and violent men would want to enter, he said. Unless delegates dismiss his pay proposal as utopian, he cited examples of offices in which people serve for little or no money. The arbiters of Quaker meetings, for instance, heard disputes that would have otherwise gone to secular courts and these duties were tedious, yet Quaker leaders performed them for no compensation. That's what Franklin explained. He also pointed to the virtuous Washington who took no salary as the general of the Continental Army. Did you know that? He didn't take a salary as general of the Continental Army, though to be fair, he did submit expenses. The convention, though, declined to adopt Franklin's proposal. They seemed a little too idealistic for them, but Franklin was participating in a bigger conversation that ran all through the constitutional debates. What kind of government could best account for the dangers inherent in human nature? Although Americans disagreed on the answer, they did not dispute the premise. Men were not angels, as Madison had written in Federalist 51. They couldn't be trusted with unchecked power. Franklin joined a more controversial debate at the convention with his proposal for prayer on June 28th. He had lived a long time, he reminded delegates, and he had become ever more certain that God oversaw human affairs. Franklin was convinced that Providence had shepherded Americans through the revolutionary crisis, and it was foolish not to call on God again. He reminded them of the early days of the Revolutionary War when the Patriots prayed, often in that very same room in Philadelphia, for God's help, at its best faith to Franklin inculcated public spiritedness and its suffocated selfishness. God had led them now to the point where they could now frame the best possible government. And have we forgotten that powerful friend, he asked? Citing Psalm 127, Franklin said that, quote, except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Furthermore, he declared, I firmly believe this. And I also believe that without his concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. Tower of Babel, he repeatedly cited the Tower of Babel in his Constitutional Convention speeches. Prideful strife, he said, would confound their work and turn their proceedings into a farce. This was the most remarkable religious episode of Ben Franklin's life. It was stunning, and not just because of the stage on which he was proposing prayer. As I said, Franklin was nearly alone among the delegates in wishing to bring prayer into the convention's proceedings. Sometimes Christians tell this story, but they don't include this part, right? Connecticut's Roger Sherman, who was one of the most devout Christians in attendance, seconded Franklin's motion, Sherman liked it. And Virginia's Edmund Randolph proposed that they could hire a pastor to preach on Independence Day less than a week later. And that minister could then open subsequent meetings with prayer. One of the problems with praying at the meetings is like you gotta hire a chaplain because you can't just up and pray, you know? And so it gets complicated, right? That's one of the reasons why they didn't do this. Beyond these three men, though, delegates seemed uninterested in arranging for prayers. Someone pointed out that they had not, in fact, budgeted funds for a chaplain. And Alexander Hamilton worried that calling in a pastor might signal that the convention was becoming desperate. There's an old story. Yeah, there's an old story that Hamilton repeatedly questioned the propriety of calling in foreign aid. I don't know if that's true, but it's a good story. So anyway, the motion was tabled. It was not adopted and they didn't open their sessions with prayer and Franklin was exasperated. He was really frustrated by this. He jotted a note at the bottom of his speech on prayer that, quote, the convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary, double exclamation points. He was really irritated by this. But they moved on. Franklin and the convention moved on. And perhaps his prayer speech did remind delegates of the need for compromise, even if it prompted no formal recourse to God by the convention. And it addressed two days after proposing prayer, Franklin explained the root of the tension between the large and the small states. If representation was apportioned according to population, he said, the small states contend that their liberties will be in danger. If an equality of votes is to be put in its place, the large states say their money is in danger. Both sides were gonna have to give up some demands to ensure a successful outcome. And drawing on earlier discussions regarding a two house legislature, Franklin suggested that the convention create, I think you know this story, a house of representatives with proportional representation and a Senate with equal representation between the states. And this became the great compromise, which was arguably the key settlement of the whole convention. And in his final speech before the assembly, Franklin warned against dogmatism, dogmatism which might derail the constitution as it went out for ratification to the states. He saw this species of moralistic perfectionism both in religion and in politics, he said. Quote, most men indeed as well as most sects in religion think themselves in possession of all truth and that wherever others differ from them is so far error. Delegates should be willing to support the constitution even if they didn't regard it as perfect. No better frame of government would emerge from additional meetings. Franklin was quote, not sure that it was not the best that they could do as it currently stood. The framers enemies were longing to hear that their councils had been confounded like what? Like those of the builders of Babel. The convention needed to present a unified front as the constitution went out for ratification. Multiple forms of government could work well anyway when administered by virtuous people. According to an oft repeated story, when someone asked Franklin after the convention whether they had created a monarchy or a republic, he replied, what? A republic, if you can keep it, okay? So, to return to our central question of Franklin in faith, who was this Franklin in Philadelphia? What did he believe? In our mind's eye, the man seems ingenious, mischievous and enigmatic. His journalistic, scientific and political achievements are clear. But what have been Franklin's religion? Was he defined by his youthful embrace of deism? His longtime friendship with George Whitfield, who was the most influential evangelist of the 18th century. His work with Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and its invocations of the creator and of nature and nature's God. Or his solitary insistence on prayer at the convention. When you add Franklin's propensity for joking about serious matters, he becomes even more difficult to pin down. Regarding Franklin's chameleon-like religion, John Adams remarked that, quote, the Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian and the friends believed him a wet Quaker. That means a Quaker who drinks. I had to look that one up myself. I think the key to understanding Franklin's ambivalent faith is the contrast between the skepticism of his adult life and the indelible imprint of his childhood Calvinism. The intense piety of his Puritan parents, I think acted as a kind of a tether spiritually, intellectually restraining Franklin's skepticism. As a teenager, it's true he abandoned his parents' Puritan beliefs, but that same traditional faith kept him from getting too far away. He would stretch his moral and doctrinal tether to the breaking point by the end of a youthful sojourn he made to London. And when he returned to Philadelphia in 1726, he resolved to conform more closely to his parents' ethical code, because he really sewed his wild oats in London and he ended up broken, you know, lots of problems from his London trip. So he knew he needed to have a moral code and he steered away from extreme deism. So he wondered, could he craft a Christianity that was centered on virtue rather than on traditional doctrine and avoid alienating his parents at the same time? This is a big part of the story. He doesn't wanna alienate his parents, he doesn't wanna alienate his sister, okay? More importantly, could he, over the long term, convince the evangelical figures in his life, his sister Jane and the revivalist George Whitfield that all was well with his soul? And he would have more success convincing his sister than George Whitfield. When he ran away from Boston as a teenager, Franklin also ran away from the city's Calvinism, but many factors, his Puritan tether, the pressure of relationships with Christian friends and family, disappointments with his own integrity, repeated illnesses, and the growing weight of political responsibility, all kept him from going too deep into the dark woods of radical skepticism. Franklin, over the course of his career, explored a number of religious opinions, and even at the end of his life, he remained non-committal about all but a few points of belief. I'll tell you more about that in a minute, but this elusiveness has made Franklin susceptible to many religious interpretations. Some devout Christians, beginning with a celebrated 19th century biographer, Parson Mason Weems, have found ways to mold Franklin into a faithful believer. Weems opined that, quote, Franklin's extraordinary benevolence and useful life were imbibed even unconsciously from the gospel. And I think there's something to this notion of Christianity's unconscious effect on Franklin, but Weems had to employ indirection here because of Franklin's repeated insistence that he doubted key points of Christian doctrine. Other Christian writers could not overlook those skeptical statements. For instance, the English Baptist minister, John Foster, wrote in 1818 that love of the useful was the cornerstone of Franklin's thought and that Franklin, quote, substantially rejected Christianity. One of the most influential interpretations of Franklin's religion appeared in Max Weber's classic study, the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, 1905, one of the most important sociological studies in world history. And for Weber, Franklin was a near perfect example of how Protestantism drained of its doctrinal particularity fostered modern capitalism, okay? And Franklin's The Way to Wealth, 1758, which distilled his best thoughts on frugality and industry, illustrated the spirit of capitalism, quote, in near classical purity and simultaneously offers the advantage of being detached from all direct connection to religious belief, Weber wrote. I think there's a lot to recommend in Weber's portrait. And as an adult, Franklin, as we've seen touted ethical responsibility, industriousness and benevolence, even as he jettisoned Christian orthodoxy. Many recent scholars have taken Franklin at his word by describing him as a deist. That's what he said in his autobiography. I became a thorough deist. Others have called him a range of things, everything from a, quote, stone cold atheist. That's what one scholar says about Franklin, which is ridiculous. He's not an atheist. That's a ridiculous thing to say about him. So that's one end of the spectrum, to a man who believed in the, quote, active God of the Israelites, the prophets and the apostles. I'm not so sure about that one either. It's better than stone cold atheists, but deism I think stands at the center of this interpretive continuum between atheism and Christian devotion. But other than indicating skepticism about traditional Christian doctrine, deism could mean many things in 18th century America and Europe. The beliefs of different deists didn't always sync up. Some said they believed in the Bible as originally written. Others doubted the Bible's reliability altogether. Some deists believe that God remained involved with life on earth. Others saw God, yes, as the cosmic watchmaker, winding up the world and then letting it run on his own. Deism meant different things to Ben Franklin over the course of his long career too, and he didn't always explain the variant meanings. So I'm not opposed to calling Ben Franklin a deist. Indeed, I do so in my book, but deist doesn't quite capture the texture or trajectory of Ben Franklin's beliefs. So in addition to this generic deist category, my book tries to dig into his beliefs and his experiences and to assess how much Franklin's personal life, life experiences, the course of his career shaped his religious beliefs, which I think is true of all of us, but including Ben Franklin. I think there's an important comparison to make here to Abraham Lincoln. Since President's Day, I thought I'd actually discuss a president here for a second. Like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin's early exposure to skeptical writings undermine his confidence in traditional Christianity, but books alone couldn't erase Franklin's childhood immersion in Puritan piety. And I'll compare him to here to Lincoln in a second. Franklin's ongoing relationships with evangelical Christians made it difficult for him to jettison the vocabulary and precepts of traditional faith altogether. Although his view of providence vacillated during his life, the weight of the American Revolution in the 1770s and 80s fostered a renewed sense in him that history had divine purposes. So, Franklin and Lincoln, both self-educated sons of Calvinist parents, both of whom had much of the Bible committed to memory, both gravitated to a revitalized sense of God's role over history as war and constitutional crises racked America in the 1770s for Franklin in the 1860s for Lincoln. Neither man's beliefs could escape the influence of their daily relationships and stressful experiences. Like Franklin, it seems that virtually every religious group in America, including Quakers and evangelicals, have tried to claim Lincoln as their own. And there can be no doubt of Lincoln's deep moral convictions about practical issues such as slavery, most obviously. And like Franklin, Lincoln's personal faith commitments are elusive. And he did not embrace the Calvinist's faith of his parents, at least not in a doctrinaire sense. Much of what we know about Lincoln's faith comes from testimonies of people around him who didn't always agree about Lincoln's faith and whose recollections may be biased or unreliable. And so Lincoln's faith causes enigmatic issues too. He also went through a skeptical season as a young man, partly through reading Tom Paine's The Age of Reason, the great skeptical book of the founding father's generation. And then Lincoln seems to have entered a more mature period of reflection on metaphysical questions from the 1850s until his death. Lincoln became increasingly fascinated with God's providential workings in history and even in Lincoln's own life, generating statements like the celebrated and intriguing comment in 1861 that he, Lincoln, would be, quote, most happy indeed if I shall be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of this his almost chosen people. Isn't that a great line? His almost chosen people, the American people. The presidency in particular required Lincoln to articulate moral and providential principles for the American public, which he did to greater effect than any other president in American history by means especially of his intimate knowledge of the King James Bible. Yet Lincoln's own faith remained uncertain and, yes, enigmatic. It is difficult to overstate just how deep an imprint the Bible itself made on Franklin's or on Lincoln's mind or on Franklin's way of speaking and writing and obviously Lincoln's too best seen in the second inaugural address. Even, you all know this, even many devout Christians today are unfamiliar with large sections of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament and they don't know much about current theological debates. Lincoln and Franklin were different from that because they knew the Bible backward and forward. They knew the whole text. We recognize this more easily for Lincoln than for Franklin because of the way the Bible shaped Lincoln's greatest speeches, especially Gettysburg and the second inaugural address. But for Franklin too, one of the things I was shocked by in my research for this biography is the way that the Bible framed the way that Franklin spoke and thought. Biblical phrases are ubiquitous in Franklin's vast body of writings. So even as he embraced religious doubts, the King James Bible colored his ideas about morality, human nature and the purpose of life. It served as his most common source of similes and anecdotes and he even enjoyed praying on friends ignorance of scripture in order to play jokes on them. He would do this routinely. He would say, look at this story. Don't you remember this story from the book of Genesis? And they would say, yeah, I remember that from Genesis and he'd laugh getting to putting it in Genesis. It wasn't anywhere in the Bible. He was just playing a joke on him. And he could do this to his friends because he knew the Bible better than virtually all of his friends. Franklin once explained the Bible saturated environment in which he grew up in Puritan Boston in a letter that he wrote to the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston. And Franklin was arranging for the publication of one of Cooper's sermons in Europe. But Franklin needed to annotate the sermon with biblical references. He said, quote, it was not necessary in New England where everybody reads the Bible and is acquainted with scripture phrases that you should note the text from which you took them, he told Cooper. But I have observed in England as well as in France that verses and expressions taken from the sacred writings and not known to be such appear very strange and awkward to some readers. And I shall therefore in my edition take the liberty of marking the quoted texts in the margin. Isn't that a great letter? It's so revealing because it tells you Franklin didn't need Cooper to insert the Bible references, he knew them by heart. So he doesn't need Cooper to tell them where he got them in the Bible, he knows. As a child of the Puritans, Franklin instantly recognized Bible phrases when he read them even from obscure sections of the text. So the shadow of scripture loomed over his long life, whatever we might say about his skepticism and deism. Franklin then was, I think, a pioneer of a distinctly American kind of religion. A distinctly American kind of religion. I'm tempted to call it an early form of Sheilaism which is the individualist religion described in Robert Bella's celebrated book, Habits of the Heart, 1985. In Bella's Sheilaism, the individual conscience is the standard for religious truth, not any external authority. And so Sheila basically, this person he interviewed, Sheila says, you know, I'm my own church. I make it up all for myself which is pretty American. But I think that Franklin's protege Tom Payne is probably a better candidate as the founder of Sheilaism because Payne said in the age of reason that quote, my own mind is my own church. Very individualistic. So I think Franklin was too tethered to external Christian ethics and institutions, you know, at least in theory, to be a forerunner of Sheilaism. Instead, I argue that Franklin was the pioneer of a related kind of faith. What I call doctrineless, moralized Christianity. Doctrineless, moralized Christianity. Here's the way this works. Franklin was an experimenter at heart and he tinkered with a novel form of Christianity one where virtually all beliefs except maybe theism become non-essential. Doctrines are non-essential except maybe believing in God. The puritans of his childhood focused too much on doctrine, he thought. And once he moved to Philadelphia, he weary to the Presbyterians they're always fighting about doctrine and expelling the heterodox and their lack of interest as he saw it in the mandates of love and charity and kindness. So for Franklin, Christianity remained a preeminent resource for virtue but he had no exclusive attachment to Christianity as a religious system or a source of salvation. In Franklin's estimation, we cannot know for certain whether doctrines such as God's Trinitarian nature are true but we do know, he said, Christians in the devout of all faiths are called to benevolence and selfless service. God calls us all to do good. Doctrinal strife is not only futile, he said but it undermines the mandate of virtue. Now there are problems with this that people in his life pointed out but just hold on for a second, I'll get to that. Doctrinalist Christianity though if you haven't noticed and Doctrinalist religion is utterly pervasive in America today. Utterly pervasive and we see it most commonly in major media figures of self-help, spirituality and success such as Oprah Winfrey, Houston megachurch pastor, Joel Osteen and the late Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People 1999 which is probably one of the best two or three selling books of the past 30 years. Although they might differ on specifics, the common message of these authors and their countless followers is that a life of love, service and significance is the best life of all. God will help you live that kind of life but your faith, these sorts of people say should be empowering and tolerant rather than fractious and nitpicking. Sociologist Christian Smith at Notre Dame says that these characteristically American beliefs amount to moralistic therapeutic deism which I also think is a good term but Doctrinalist moralized Christianity I think gets more down to the nugget of what's going on with Franklin. Many of today's most prominent exponents of this sort of moralistic therapeutic deism such as Osteen live out their faith in particular congregations and traditions. Even Oprah Winfrey has testified that quote, I am a Christian, that is my faith. However she says, I am not asking you to be a Christian if you want to be one, I can show you how but it is not required end quote. Doctrinalist Christians agree that people may need to believe in some doctrines. Our personal understanding of God can help us. We may need particular beliefs to enable our best life now in Joel Osteen's phrase but ultimately the focus of Doctrinalist Christianity is a life of good works, resiliency and generosity now. Now faith helps us to embody disciplined benevolent success in this life and that's what God wants for us. That's what these folks say. And it's easy to dismiss this kind of pop faith today as peddled by wealthy media superstars but I would argue it is America's most common code of spirituality, most common. And for Ben Franklin, Doctrinalist moralized Christianity was serious intellectual business. It was born out of contemporary religious debates and out of dissatisfaction with his family's Puritanism and like many skeptics in the 18th century, Ben Franklin was weary of 300 years of fighting over the implications of the Protestant Reformation. Much of that fighting concerned church authority and particular doctrines. And Franklin grew up in a world of intractable conflict between Catholics and Protestants but also between and within Protestant denominations themselves. What good was Christianity if it precipitated pettiness and persecution and violence? So unlike some self-help celebrities today, Franklin and his cohort of European and American deus reckoned that in promoting a Doctrinalist ethics focused Christianity, they were redeeming Christianity itself. How successful that redemptive effort was, you all will have to decide for yourselves. Could you really have a non-exclusive, doctrinally minimal, morality centered Christianity? Or did the effort fatally compromise Christianity itself? Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and many of their friends in America, Britain and France, well they wanted to give it a try. So 13 years after Franklin's death, for instance, Jefferson wrote that he considered himself, quote, a Christian in the only sense Jesus wished anyone to be. He admired Jesus's, quote, moral doctrines as more pure and perfect than any other philosophers. But to Jefferson, Jesus's excellence was only human. Jesus never claimed to be anything else, Jefferson said. Christians, including authors of the New Testament books, imposed the claims of divinity on Jesus after he had gone to his grave and not risen again. Jefferson concluded. Well, Franklin didn't go as far as Jefferson. He preferred, Franklin preferred not to dogmatize one way or the other on matters such as Jesus's divinity. And in a classic tension that still marks American religion, maybe in some of y'all's families, Franklin's devout parents, his sister Jane and the Reverend George Whitfield, all found doctrinalist Christianity to be dangerous, real dangerous. Yes, they agreed that morality was essential. And yes, it was better not to fight over minor theological issues, but true belief in Jesus was necessary for salvation. To the Puritans and evangelicals, Jesus was fully God and fully man. Doubting that truth put your soul in jeopardy. Jesus had made the way for sinners to be saved through his atoning death and miraculous resurrection. It wasn't enough to emulate Jesus's life as important as that was. More than a moral teacher, Jesus was Lord and savior, honoring Christ's required belief in doctrinal truth. But Franklin wasn't so sure. Perhaps the Puritans and Presbyterians of his youth had gotten it wrong. Perhaps he was the one who was getting back to Jesus's core teachings, but he was sure that doing good, that was the grand point. Well, for most of his life, Franklin had traditional Christian inquirers, especially family and friends, who asked him about the state of his beliefs and the state of his soul. Among the most consistent of those inquirers, as we have seen were Jane Mecombe, his sister and George Whitfield. In the last few weeks of Franklin's life, though, one more inquirer came on the stage. Franklin had known Yale College President Ezra Stiles ever since Yale granted Franklin an honorary master's degree in 1753 in honor of Franklin's electrical experiments. Stiles, a congregationalist minister and broad-minded Calvinist, realized that Franklin was near death. Quote, you have merited and received all the honors of the Republic of Letters and are going to a world where all subliminary glories will be lost in the glories of immortality, Stiles wrote him. But Stiles paused. Would it be impertinent of him to ask about his belief in Christ? Quote, as much as I know of Dr. Franklin's Stiles confessed, I have not an idea of his religious sentiments. I wish to know the opinion of my venerable friend concerning Jesus of Nazareth. Stiles adored Franklin, but he still wished Franklin would have clear title to quote that happy immortality, which I believe Jesus alone has purchased for the virtuous and truly good of every religious denomination. Franklin respected Ezra Stiles so five weeks before his death, Franklin penned a response, which he asked Stiles to keep confidential. Apparently he didn't, because we're here talking about it. I'm sure glad we have it. Quote, you desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it, Franklin wrote. Well, that's not true. I don't know why Franklin said that, because his parents, Jane Mecom, George Whitfield, others had been asking him about it all his life. Anyway, he said, I do not take your curiosity amiss and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it. He wrote, here is my creed. I believe in one God, creator of the universe, that he governs it by his providence, that he ought to be worshiped, that the most acceptable service we can offer that the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children, that the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life, respecting its conduct in this. So at the end of his life, Franklin was a providentialist. He was a believer in the duties of worship and benevolence and he expected God would rule in a final judgment. Then he continued, as to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see, Franklin wrote. But he still had his doubts. Quote, I apprehend Christ's teachings have received various corrupting changes. And I have some doubts as to his divinity. Though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it. Franklin never doubted how admirable Christ's moral teachings were. He just did not know if he could accept the New Testament's doctrinal claims about Jesus. And then comes the joke. There's always a joke on these things. He said, he thought that it was needless to busy myself with it now when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. So he didn't know if he could know the truth about Christ and salvation, but he knew he was gonna find out soon enough. In spite of his qualms about traditional Christianity, he saw, quote, no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequences, it probably does, of making his doctrines, Jesus' doctrines, more respected and better observed. For Franklin, the point was never just belief, but virtuous action. I shall only add, respecting myself, he concluded in his letter to Stiles, that having experienced the goodness of that being and conducting me prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness. God had always been good to him, and Franklin saw no reason to think that God's kindness would stop when he died, and die he did on April 17th, 1790. And he left the enigma of his faith unresolved. But in his code of doctrinalist moralized Christianity, he became the founding father of perhaps the most pervasive kind of spirituality in the Western world today. Thank you all very much. We'd like to have a time for questions. I think we have a roving mic, right? Okay. We need two rovers with it. There we go. And while we're getting ready for that, I'll start out with a question myself. The context, so the atmosphere, this is the time of the Enlightenment, so rationalism is very great. It's also the time of the Great Awakening. How do those two things fit together and shape what's going on? Okay. Right, and so for a long time, an older understanding of the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment would have been that they were at odds. I think that there's at least an emerging historical consensus now that the Enlightenment, whatever that was, I have some problems with the term the Enlightenment myself, because it comes loaded with a lot of ideological baggage, especially about the dark times that preceded it, the times of Christianity. But now I think we start to see people like Jonathan Edwards in particular as a figure of the Enlightenment, because he's contending with Newtonianism and he's contending with John Locke and he's saying that all these new developments in scientific and philosophical knowledge, they do not wreck Christianity. Instead, they support Christianity and we can find our way in the midst of all these, even as the skeptics say, this will bring down traditional Christianity and so forth. So if you're reacting to the Enlightenment, you're also an Enlightenment figure. And without getting into the weeds about it, one of the things that's new about evangelicalism, quote unquote, in the 1740s is there almost becomes a sort of scientific understanding of how conversion happens that sounds very Enlightenment, except that it's all in the name of, how is a person saved and what does that look like? And so the difference is that with the Puritans, they would have thought, conversion is very long drawn out, uncertain. You would never really say, I know I'm saved because I got saved on such and such a day. The Puritans wouldn't say things like that, where especially the Methodists, John Wesley and the Methodists and George Whitfield is influenced by this, they think that there's almost a predictable sequence of how things will go that you will recognize that pastors can take people through and you will know when you're saved because you will have seen the what? The evidence, right? And evidence, I mean that's one of the defining terms of the Enlightenment is evidence and scientific inquiry. And so you can know when it happened. And so I think that there are obviously tensions and the radical Enlightenment, the French side of the Enlightenment tends to be much more anti-Christian, anti-clerical. The American side, the British side, much more friendly to Christianity. Scottish side for sure. John Witherspoon is sort of the great product of the Scottish Enlightenment. In America who devout Christian man of the Enlightenment, Edwards is that way. So it's not nearly so much intention as we would have thought, say, 50 years ago. Questions from the floor. Thank you so much, Dr. Kidd, for the lecture. I especially like to hear how we can see a figure not static but on a journey in his own life, a spiritual journey of some sort. My question is, you talked about influences that helped shape his spiritual journey. What about the influences of his family? His daughter, his wife, is there anything that we can say? Sometimes maybe a person's response to their own children is the crux of what they really believe. Anything in your research there? Yeah. Well, of course, his parents were the ones who were responsible for this indelible biblical imprint. And devout Puritan household, his father had come in the 1670s to Boston and so very much and still in that kind of milieu. And so one of the things you realize about Franklin is there's a certain level at which he's so formed by biblical education in the home. You probably know he has almost no formal education at all. He goes one year to Latin school and then they take him out. And so he has this deep, biblical-assist education from his parents that stays with him for his whole life. And maybe he would have been more radically skeptical. I don't know, but that imprint is really left with him. His wife, I think Deborah Franklin is, from, we all have a lot of written evidence left from her, but I believe that she was a serious Anglican. And so if there's a denominational connection for Franklin in his adult life, it's the Church of England, the Anglican church, what becomes the Episcopal church after the revolution. And he went to Christ Church, Philadelphia with his wife. They had a pew rented. There was one time where I think somebody took her a copy of the Book of Common Prayer and didn't return it. So he advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette, bring back my wife's, we will forgive you and just put it back in the pew. And so he was there with her, I think a lot of Sundays. Sitting next to her. Now, the problem is, is that pretty much for the second half of Ben Franklin's life, he's in Europe and his wife doesn't go with them. And one of the most problematic things about Franklin's story is that he knows that Deborah is very ill. She has a stroke on the eve of the revolution and for whatever reason he won't go back and he has opportunities to go back. So they're not in an overt way but they're pretty well estranged by that point. And it's pretty consp... I hate to say this because I mean, I admire Franklin, we admire Franklin, but he basically gets word of her death and then immediately leaves to go home. It's not his finest moment. And so I think once he's gone from Philadelphia, you know, Deborah's influence is very much in the background but Jane Mecom's influence remains much more present. And they have a very active correspondence and he had a lot of siblings, he had siblings that died early and so forth but they were pretty close in age. And for some reason, I mean, sometimes you come from a big family and you have that one sibling, she's that sibling for him. And she's constantly talking to him about the Lord and kind of you know how we grew up and you need to be faithful to what we were taught and those kind of things. I mean, just one example, when George Whitfield dies, he dies before Jane or Ben, you know, they write back and forth to each other and talk about how sad they are that Whitfield's gone. That's one of the reasons by the way that you know that Ben Franklin's relationship with Whitfield is significant is because he talks about it in private. He talks about it in letters that he doesn't ever expect people to see. And he says, I love Mr. Whitfield. He has more integrity than any person I've ever known. And they exchange, they're just wonderful letters. Most of Jane's letters are lost because some knucklehead said, you know, woman in the past, who cares? You know, I'm thinking, could you just save it just because it's Ben Franklin's sister? You know, I mean, I know your contempt was a woman's history, but please just, but no, they throw all of Jane's letters away. So sometimes it's like playing telephone with people where you hear what Ben Franklin says to her. And it's really funny sometimes because you can tell she's been on his case. I just love it, you know. And he'll say, I know we fought the last time we were together, but here's a present I'm sending you. I hope it makes it better. You know, can you imagine Ben Franklin saying this? But he really loved her and they had a very, I think, sweet relationship, even though they knew they weren't on the same page. And he would, you know, send her money because he was rich and she was poor, and you know, you look after her. Anyway. Let's take another one right here. I'm sure for the video. Thank you. I was interested in your parallels between Franklin and Lincoln. Lincoln obviously seems like he was rebelling from the Puritan or Calvinistic lifestyle that his parents. I don't think Lincoln had that same issue, but can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, so I guess one thing I wanted to know was there's something about the fact that Calvinism is basically a religion of law? Is there something about that that really pushed them away from it? Yeah, and they're, you know, they're not, believe me, I'm Franklin expert, not Lincoln, but you know, they're not exactly the same kind of Calvinism that they're growing up with and it's a long time apart, but still, I mean, there's an intensely devout home. I don't think, you know, we necessarily need to go to, well, it's because Calvinism is like this, or I mean, we all know stories, especially in an environment like this where you grow up in a devout home and then you punt, at least for a while, and you know, I think for Franklin, I mean, he has a difficult childhood because, you know, it's a working-class family in Colonial America and it's intense and he's, after he spends this one year at the Boston Latin School, he is apprenticed to his older brother, which is a horrible, I mean, you know, can you imagine, you know, being apprenticed to your sibling, and this basically means that he's an indentured servant to his older brother. And they didn't get along. And Franklin talks about in his autobiography that his brother would beat him, you know, I mean, because indentured servants were treated like temporary slaves. And so his brother, James, says, you know, you're my servant. You obey what, can you imagine with your older brother? I mean, no, but this wouldn't work out well with anybody, right? And so that's why Franklin runs away. He ran away from Boston as a teenager to get away from his brother. And, you know, to get away from this lousy situation. So, you know, I don't know how much of it was against his parents. I know it was against his brother, but his parents had sort of fostered this situation, which was a really dismal situation. So he's rejecting his family. I get the sense with Lincoln that it's a little bit more of an intellectual thing that he just started, you know, he decided, you know, I'm not gonna be a farmer. He starts reading, they're both just read everything they can get their hands on. And so he gets a whole of the age of reason, maybe some other deistic tracks, and it seems, you know, it starts. And this is another familiar story. As you grow up in a really intense Christian environment, maybe you haven't been introduced to some other perspectives, and you read it, and it's, you know, all of a sudden, you know, fireworks are going off, and you say, I don't know, what do I believe now? I mean, this is sort of a classic American religious story, right, and I think that's some of what happened to Lincoln. I'm sure with Franklin, it's also tied up with, he's just the kind of guy that wants to sow his wild oats. And, you know, I don't wanna, there's young children here, so I don't wanna say everything, but I mean, he did everything in London that you can imagine, including he comes back with a son, which is very strange, because all through American history, when you have unmarried parents, single parent is almost always the mom. But somehow, Franklin ended up with the child that he, they had in London. So he did everything sowing your wild oats. So I just have a question concerning your word choice. Yeah. Do you hear Franklin's beliefs as, I think, doctrine-less, moralistic Christianity? Am I close there? Okay, so my question is, do you believe that the word Christianity is simply a religious word, and could therefore indicate that there are many variations of the religion? It's not really indicator of relationship, or is Christianity a reference to an individual's commitment to the person of Jesus Christ? And therefore, I mean, if it's the first, I think the word choice is accurate, Christianity, he simply had a variation of that religion. If it's the second, and it refers to a relationship, I'm curious why you chose that word. Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Thank you. And so I do not see personally Jefferson and Franklin's religion as true Christianity. I mean, if you want to know what I think. But they saw it as Christianity. Okay, so part of the reason I do it, the way that I do, is because I'm trying to explain how they saw what they were doing. And they saw, and Jefferson was even a little more explicit about it than Franklin was. You know, he said, I am a Christian, and then he denies Jesus as divinity. And so for many of y'all orthodox Christian, small orthodox Christian, this is no good. Right, but for historians, you start with how did they understand what they thought they were doing, and if you describe it that way, I think it's a little more foreign to our eyes and ears than calling them a deist. I mean, because we make certain associations with deists that then make it difficult to understand why Franklin is calling on them and open with prayer, why he expresses so much respect for Jesus' moral teachings. And what I'm trying to do is open up a vista on a strain of thought in the 18th century where they thought I can be a Christian without believing in this long list of doctrines, except for the existence of God, right? So that's why I do it that way. But yeah, I can, you know, I don't think it's true Christianity. But so that's a, you know, and I think that's a true, like, you know, I'm not saying like this is all relativistic. I think there's a true version of Christianity, but it's also an observable fact through Christian history that there's a lot of different kinds, and you know, that's a problem. The enigma of Benjamin Franks' religion, as you've so well described, it sounds very similar to sort of the enigma of George Washington's Christianity as well. And would you put Washington into the sort of the same category of doctrine-less moralistic Christianity, and then sort of a appendage to that, sort of Marsden and Hatch and other great Christian scholars have sort of linked the Christianity, this kind of Christianity in service to radical republicanism of the founding period, and sort of more than sort of morality or true Christianity, do you see that as well? Yeah. Well, so with Washington, Washington is more guarded about what he thinks. I mean, we don't have a letter from Washington like that letter to Stiles where he just says, let me just tell you, this is what I think about things. My take on Washington is, and you know, I mean, it's very disputed in the scholarly literature on Washington, but I think that Washington is a kind of a moderate Anglican who doesn't like talking publicly about what he believes. I mean, and he says very little about his own personal beliefs. By contrast, he's quite articulate about, you know, God's role in the history of the American Republic and the farewell address and, you know, religion is absolute, you know, religion and morality are indispensable supports for the Republic and all these kinds. I mean, it's quite lovely the way that he'll talk about religion's role in the American Republic, but I set that in some contrast to what, you know, Washington believed personally. Now, there are a couple of oddities about Washington that some of you know. Washington clearly had made a personal decision that he, in all of his vast correspondence, there's only maybe one or two direct references to Jesus Christ in his vast body of correspondence. It's clear to me that he made a personal decision that he was not going to ever name that name. Why? I don't know. Is it too sacred? Does it reflect some kind of skepticism? I don't know. We also know that Washington will not take communion. And he would go to church and he would leave, you know, when it was time to have communion, which was not an unheard of practice, but I think for somebody like Washington, that means something. What does it mean? Does it mean it's too sacred? I'm not sure, you know, or is he skeptical about it? I don't know. But there's oddities about Washington that he just never explains. But the idea is religion. So the question about the republic, republicanism. I mean, the connection there to me, and I think some of those historians you mentioned, Mark Noel in particular, sees there being a strong tension between republican political ideology, which is basically kind of the animating ideology of the revolution and traditional Christianity. I don't see that tension that, I mean, I know what Mark Noel is talking about and I love him, but I don't see that tension because it wasn't a tension for the people involved. I mean, so if you had been able to pull them like, does Christianity sort of support what you're trying to do in the revolution, the creation of the American Republic? 100% yes, right? I mean, of course it does. And so, you know, Franklin, when he talks about the value of, and even when he supposedly said a republic, if you can keep it, what he means by that is republics require virtue, right? And that's just, everybody agrees on that in 1770s, everybody. I mean, Madison, you know, what kind of toys around with, well, I'm not sure people are gonna be virtuous, which is right, right? Okay, we know that. So could you have a republic that would still continue to function if people were given over to selfishness? But nobody would dispute the idea that it would be really good for the republic to have a virtuous people. And so then you say, okay, so where does virtue come from? From Christianity, you know, because virtually everybody living in America at the time is at least nominally Christian. And so it all works perfectly fine for them. I mean, I know that in Europe there are these heretics that were Republican theorists and all this sort of stuff, but in America there just wasn't that tension. So I see Christianity for the founding fathers as, and I'm not talking about their personal beliefs, that's another issue. But Christianity in a public sense fosters republicanism. Yeah, we had Pete Lill back here last year speaking on that very question on the faith of Washington. And I think the tape is still available on the CCU website. Well, anyway, we're so glad you took the time to be with us. Can we thank Dr. Kidd for being here? Thank you.